marco's µ.blog

In continuation of week 11, here are a few thoughts and things that caught my attention in the 12th week of 2024:

• 😴 Actually, this week was a very quiet week in terms of tech-related stuff. It was probably because I was very busy at work and in the evenings, I preferred to relax with a game of Balatro¹ instead of surfing the net a lot.

• 🛠️ This week, many things just broke. It started with dishes, not just once, followed by a PS5 controller that wouldn’t turn on anymore and got dangerously hot while charging and started to smell. Then, the power supply of the old MacBook simply quit working, a 256 GB USB stick made my Mac crash reproducibly as soon as I tried to access it, the crank handle of my Playdate just broke without any external force², our eCargo bike suddenly refused to go any further (Error E010), the coffee machine at work gave up the ghost, and my knee is broken. Well, it’s been messed up for 30 years, it just hurts more this week than usual. I think that’s a good sign for next week. It can only get better.

• 🔄 The developer of Anybox has released a new app: Event countdown & up - Pinning app. I was a long-time user of Countdowns before I switched to Up Ahead because the latter was much more fun to use. However, there has been no update for over ten months, and I’m somewhat reluctant to pay a subscription price for that. I’ll take a look at Pinning, although there is no macOS version yet and it also has a subscription model behind it. Otherwise, I should dig out Countdowns again. It works wonderfully, it just doesn’t look nice at all.

• 🎉 Robb announced that his Podcast Ruminate joined MacStories. Congrats!

• 🤔 I was curious and also signed up for Scribbles. I definitely don’t need another way to blog, but I kind of like the projects by Vincent.

• 🧩 Table of contents — for Safari on the App Store: A funny little plugin that does exactly what it promises.

• ❤️ I was absolutely impressed that I sent a feature request to the developer of Default Folder X and he replied on the same day that he had implemented the feature and it will be included in the next release.

• 🐶 Besides, I was pleased that you can now use Siri in German without saying “Hey.” This solves our biggest mistake in dog training. We chose “Hey” as a stop signal (“no”) for our dog, and therefore we could only ask the Homepods to do things via voice very limitedly, otherwise, we would completely confuse our dog every time 😅.

• 🎮 I’ve finished Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (GB) on my Analogue Pocket and started playing Mario vs. Donkey Kong (GBA). The next real Mario game will be Super Mario 64. I’ve been thinking a bit about how and on which system I want to play it. I’ve decided to buy the Nintendo 64 bluetooth controller and try it on the Switch via Nintendo Switch Online Plus.

• 🎥 We watched The Shawshank Redemption (1994) (again) with our sons. What a damn good movie.

• 🎸 I was at an IDLES concert 🤘.

Have a wonderfull week ahead!